Word: diderot
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Many of the bones required a high order of scientific sleuthing. In 1978 one of Webb's students, Diderot Gicca, came up with a jawbone that totally baffled the team. Careful study showed it to be part of a hitherto unknown giant ancestor of the raccoon. Students also found a mastodon, an ancestral kin of the elephant, with two pairs of tusks, the lower ones resembling shovels. For a time, they were also puzzled by what seemed an unusually large (nearly 3 ft.) metacarpal bone. It belonged to a creature called Aepycamelus major, the giraffe camel. No less surprising...
...Diderot's Rhetoric of the Living Machine--Prof. Aram Vartanian, New York University; Boylston Library...
This fixation on truth and nature endeared him to advanced thinkers in France, especially to Denis Diderot, compiler of the monumental Encyclopedia. "It is the chief business of art," Diderot declared in 1765, "to touch and to move, and to do this by getting close to nature." Chardin, Diderot said, epitomized that ambition at work: "Welcome back, great magician, with your mute compositions! How eloquently they speak to the artist! How much they tell him about the representation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!" Few painters have ever had such...
This patient construction, this sense of the intrinsic worth of seeing, combines with Chardin's second gift: his remarkable feeling for the poetic (rather than didactic) moments of human gesture. It permeates his genre scenes and portraits, especially the portraits of children; the gentle muteness that Diderot perceived often turns into a noble ineloquence, as though Piero della Francesca were visiting the nursery. In some way Chardin's absorption in the act of painting paralleled the absorption of children in their games, which he painted. One has only to look at the figure in his portrait Little Girl...
...from the classroom any teacher who is not 'alive.' A teacher of language should be in total command of the language, but he should also be a firebrand and an actor." That perfectly describes Rassias himself. For an upper-class lecture on the 18th century French philosopher Diderot, Rassias shows up in class in a blond wig, breeches and billowing shirt and proceeds to act out the emotional states that Diderot argued are unique to man. Rage, for instance, is depicted by heaving a chair across the room. Says Rassias: "If you want to teach, you have...